I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Gamers today are not price-averse like they might have been when the gaming demographic was mostly teens.
After a peek at your website, I see I'm quite a bit younger than you. I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro. In some servers I've even seen young teens (13-14) spending their allowance money on it. It would be interesting, based on your anecdote, if most Nitro subscribers are young users. It might be due to the custom emotes, which are probably more desirable to younger users than older ones.
On top of that, Discord has become the main social media platform for some people. I can't imagine using it that way myself, but I know a lot of people who are in a massive number of servers and spend much of their day on it. It's not just gaming voice chat for them, it's an entire social network. These people, who also tend to be quite young, almost always have Nitro, because it's worth paying $5-10/month for their main online platform.
Maybe the main area of concern for Discord should be whether these young users keep their subscriptions as they age.
Discord is in this weird situation where they've been massively successful at some specific things that people aren't willing to spend money on, and not, as best as I can tell, anywhere else.
They're absolutely the community chat tool of choice these days - just about every subreddit you go to, every fandom you could ever think of, has a discord community. It's incredibly easy to put one together.
But things like Nitro seem to have minimal adoption. The game store isn't particularly compelling. They've got some partnerships with games where they offer Discord up as the actual in-game voice communication, but I haven't seen much adoption of that, and I don't know if it actually results in revenue for them, either.
It's not unique - we've seen plenty of major tech companies in similar spots - but they've basically all pivoted to advertisements as a way to make money, something that Discord has categorically said they don't want to do. I don't know what they could do to really turn things around here.
I pay for nitro, I don't use discord non stop but it's great for a bunch of niche channels i'm on. I'm happy to pay $10 to a platform that makes it easier for me to find information and I know a bunch of my colleagues pay as well. All in we still support individual projects as well but truthfully it's the cost of a beer a month.
You can pay for Discord. Admittedly, I do. It's not that Discord is perfect, I have a lot of personal gripes with it. But it's still significantly better than where I came from (Skype) and I use it a lot so it seems fair enough. Discord Nitro also thankfully pivoted from being a games service and the features it does provide are nice to have. (Larger file uploads, better stream quality, cross-server emoji.)
I've been a discord user since the very beginning - I joined in July 2015. In almost 10 years of using discord, I've never had to do anything, even a required updated. I've paid for Nitro on and off over that time, and am currently paying $3/mo. I think less than a take away coffee per month for a decade of hassle free chat is worth it, and it's less than running even the cheapest of cheap VPS's
They have pushed monetization recently. Discord Nitro went from custom id, animated avatar and all emotes of all your servers everywhere to a game subscription service (obviously while raising the price)
Relaying some text is cheap. If I had to pay 3x the actual server cost to run one (so the rest can go toward development and staff), it would still be minuscule.
My friend circles on discord have enough people with nitro that it's almost certainly cash-positive by a lot.
I've been a Discord Nitro subscriber since Nov. 2017, so I welcome any additional benefits. That said, I'm not entirely a fan of the game store model. I know Discord's primary audience are gamers, but that's not why I use Discord.
Voice chat is fairly easy, it's not actually a huge use of bandwidth (in principle it can be basically none and peer-to-peer but that has privacy implications and discord now routes it all through a proxy). The CDN is probably the largest cost, and they have made moves towards cracking down on using it as an image host. But they do have a good income from selling Nitro features, much as many people don't see any value in them. They aren't quite profitable yet, but they're far from burning cash either.
Anecdotally, yes, but I doubt most users deliberately make themselves unprofitable. There're millions of kids who just want to use voice chat and share meme gifs. Plus Discord has been gating a lot of features behind Nitro in recent years, and they make a lot of money from Nitro/Boost purchases (it's hard to tell since they're privately owned but they might make close to 200 million this year). I suspect they can stay afloat without VC funding (though they keep getting it anyway). And their valuation is really high.
Discord is arguably the smoothest experience there is, like bar none. How do you suppose it should be paid for? Discord Nitro is the least obtrusive way.
Discord might have a lot of Nitro sales, but that's probably dwarfed by their CDN and bandwidth costs of all the streaming that goes on with it. The infrastructure to relay massive scale of streams (even without transcoding) is not cheap. There's only so many streaming minutes at 720p that a single $9.99 nitro sub can support.
They also do gif transcoding and a bunch of other things that do take actual compute resources that cost money.
Nitro is one of extremely few SaaS things I actually pay for, it's seems very worthwhile given how generally not fucked the discord experience is in terms of trying to extract value from their users.
We use Discord as the primary communication channel for our two-man startup and love it. Both me and my co-founder pay for Nitro not because we want to participate in an "internet caste system" (my-founder is basically the only person that would actually see my "Nitro" status and vice versa), but because we want to support a great product that has served us well over the years. Some of the perks are fun but generally go unused by us.
Microsoft buys communities. From the 20% Facebook investment to LinkedIn, GitHub, Minecraft, etc they are aggregating and integrating massive, generation defining audiences. Discord is most definitely that for gamers, pandemic teens, and frankly any SMB with foresight. It’s a fantastic platform. It has the same moderation issues that all online communities have, but it generally happens at a server level.
It’s very much a fit for their portfolio, and it’s a great time to sell for them. Nitro can’t do that much in sales, but certainly Microsoft will find a way to make money with it.
I'm continually impressed with Discord and their technical blogs contribute to my respect for them. I use it in both my personal life (I run a small server for online friends, plus large game centric servers) and my professional life (instead of Slack). It's a delight to use, the voice chat is extremely high quality, text chat is fast and searchable, and notifications actually work. Discord has become the de facto place for many gaming communities to organize which is a big deal considering how discriminating and exacting PC gamers can be.
My only concern is their long term viability and I don't just mean money wise. I'm concerned they'll have to sacrifice the user experience to either achieve sustainability or consent to a buyout by a larger company that only wants the users and brand. I hope I'm wrong, and I bought a year of Nitro to do my part.
Discord has 300+ million users (based on the forbes article). Even if everyone were paying for the cheap $5/mo nitro classic (which is worst case scenario for revenue, but best case scenario for # of paying customers) subscription, that's 24 million paying subscribers, which is less than 10% of their user base. Seems pretty reasonable given that the free tier includes so much.
If you're paying for Discord every month, it's actually fairly expensive. A lot of the good features unlock once people start boosting servers with Nitros and those aren't cheap either. So I'd assume they aren't bleeding cash left and right on infra costs. They might actually breaking even on the infra costs at least.
In my opinion, Discord has done a good job of withstanding the typical enshittification[1] of their platform. I've been using Discord for 7 years now, and while I have my complaints (poor archival functionality, video streaming can be hard to troubleshoot), it's my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to build a friendly online community.
I am deeply worried about their future because their path to profitability has always been a bit of question mark. As of this point in time, I pay for nitro namely for the higher video streaming bandwidth, and to hopefully vote with my wallet so that the platform doesn't try to squeeze more revenue out of its users in ungracious ways.
Discord's Partner program[3] seems like a good first step to assuage my concerns , but at the end of the day it puts them more closely in competition with Twitch and YouTube, since all of these platforms are basically competing for broadcast time from a small handful of entertainers with huge amounts of loyal followers willing to subject themselves to ads.
After a peek at your website, I see I'm quite a bit younger than you. I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro. In some servers I've even seen young teens (13-14) spending their allowance money on it. It would be interesting, based on your anecdote, if most Nitro subscribers are young users. It might be due to the custom emotes, which are probably more desirable to younger users than older ones.
On top of that, Discord has become the main social media platform for some people. I can't imagine using it that way myself, but I know a lot of people who are in a massive number of servers and spend much of their day on it. It's not just gaming voice chat for them, it's an entire social network. These people, who also tend to be quite young, almost always have Nitro, because it's worth paying $5-10/month for their main online platform.
Maybe the main area of concern for Discord should be whether these young users keep their subscriptions as they age.
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